Twists in life writing and the writing life

Reviewed by Peter Kenneally

''I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.'' So said V. S. Naipaul, renowned novelist and Nobel laureate, in 2011, causing an inevitable, and intended, outcry. The outburst, one of many in a long life filled with such provocation, would not have surprised anyone who had read Philip French's 2008 biography of Naipaul, with its revelations about his treatment of the women in his life.

Hanif Kureishi's The Last Word is a fictional account of the writing of that biography: the fiction is sometimes spread thinly and sometimes laid on with an industrial-sized trowel. Ageing post-colonial novelist Mamoon Azam, with a Nobel prize but few sales, is a simulacrum of Naipaul, and the Mamoon character is portrayed with all his faults gleaming in the light.

Kureishi, in his own way just as much a provocateur and ageless enfant terrible as Naipaul, enjoys those faults no end, while at the same time wanting to honour the depth and craft of writing such as Naipaul/Mamoon's, and mourn its loss, in our post-literate, click bait world.

However, elegy isn't really his style, so it's buried here in a breathless mix of rhetoric, sex, theatrical confrontation, and more sex. The central character, biographer Harry Johnson, is a blithely televisual invention: tall, handsome, upper-class, with a psychiatrist father and a mad mother who killed herself when he was 12. Losing a parent changes anyone, irrevocably, but in this case, the requirements of the plot mean that, magically, motherlessness turns Harry into a louche English version of Alvin Purple: every woman he comes across gives him, at the very least, the glad eye.

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Most of the action takes place in and around Mamoon's house in the depths of the English countryside, where he lives with his wife, Liana, in cantankerous, sexless decline. Harry's biographical method is to inveigle and browbeat in equal measure, trying to worm truth out of Mamoon, and to find out as much as he can from others by whatever means possible.

The setting allows Kureishi to create a kind of English country house comedy, but it is gothic and murky, far more Cold Comfort Farm than Blandings Castle, and though Harry is a kind of orphan he is also the something nasty in the woodshed.

Harry's trousers lead him to the local pub, a soulful girl, and a coupling in the Hogarthian squalor of a council house on a chav-infested estate. The girl, her mother, and her brother, it turns out, have a longstanding relationship with Mamoon, as employees and surrogate family. They have a kind of frayed, dissolute, literate nobility that makes no sense, but has great appeal. It makes up for the often bizarre dialogue, which has characters barking abuse or ''wit'' at each other, drawing-room style, for no obvious reason, or in Harry's case, being flirtatious in a crass ''nudge-nudge'' way. It is all very distancing, even silly.

Mamoon and Harry, apparently polar opposites, are actually very similar. They both assume the right, as writers, to have their career, their ego, their libido, massaged by women, often the same women. If the women fall by the wayside, it's their own fault, and in the case of Harry's mother, so is his character. Are they worth the pain they cause? We don't know Mamoon's work (we may have read Naipaul, but Kureishi is cheating by relying on that) and Harry is clearly a hack.

They both resemble Kureishi as well. Reading The Last Word is often like watching a Woody Allen movie, one in which Allen doesn't appear, but the lead actor does an impression of him instead. In the end Mamoon, Harry and Hanif agree that what matters most is to count for something as an artist, or to do justice/service to those who do.

Mamoon's work counts for everything, Harry is redeemed because he does the necessary service, while Hanif Kureishi wraps everything up in a professionally offhand flurry of exposition, and lets his breath out at last with an elegiac and heartfelt hymn to the writer's art. I almost believed him.